“This is one of the finest articles written in response
to the latest wave of anti-Semitism”-- Efraim Zuroff, Director, Simon Wiesenthal Center,
writing in The Jerusalem Post

“Tom Gross makes some good points during the course
of this article”-- Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief, The Guardian,
which is strongly criticized in the article

“This is a brilliant, fascinating piece”-- Andrew Roberts, British historian

Jeningrad

What the British media said

By Tom Gross

This article first appeared on National Review Online. Even ten years after it was first published, it continues to be discussed, for example here in The Jerusalem Post. Extracts and information from it have also been cited or used in a number of television programs, conferences and books.

THE MYTH OF JENINGRAD

By Tom Gross, May 13, 2002

Israel’s actions in Jenin were “every
bit as repellent” as Osama bin Laden’s attack on New York
on September 11, wrote Britain’s Guardian in its lead editorial
of April 17.

“We are talking here of massacre, and a cover-up,
of genocide,” said a leading columnist for the Evening Standard,
London’s main evening newspaper, on April 15.

“Rarely in more than a decade of war reporting
from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, have I seen such deliberate
destruction, such disrespect for human life,” reported Janine di
Giovanni, the London Times’s correspondent in Jenin, on April 16.

NOW that
even the Palestinian Authority has admitted that there was no massacre in
Jenin last month – and some Palestinian accounts speak instead of
a “great victory against the Jews” in door-to-door fighting
that left 23 Israelis dead – it is worth taking another look at how
the international media covered the fighting there. The death count is still
not completely agreed. The Palestinian Authority now claims that 56 Palestinians
died in Jenin, the majority of whom were combatants according to the head
of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah organization in the town. Palestinian hospital
sources in Jenin put the total number of dead at 52. Last week’s Human
Rights Watch report also said 52 Palestinians died. Israel says 46 Palestinians
died, all but three of whom were combatants. Palestinian medical sources
have confirmed that at least one of these civilians died after Israel withdrew
from Jenin on April 12, as a result of a booby-trapped bomb that Palestinian
fighters had planted accidentally going off.

A terrorist press conference

Yet one month ago, the media’s favorite Palestinian spokespersons,
such as Saeb Erekat – a practiced liar if ever there was one –
spoke first of 3,000 Palestinian dead, then of 500. Without bothering to
check, the international media just lapped his figures up.

The British media was particularly emotive in its reporting. They devoted
page upon page, day after day, to tales of mass murders, common graves,
summary executions, and war crimes. Israel was invariably compared to the
Nazis, to al Qaeda, and to the Taliban. One report even compared the thousands
of supposedly missing Palestinians to the “disappeared” of Argentina.
The possibility that Yasser Arafat’s claim that the Palestinians had
suffered “Jeningrad” might be – to put it mildly –
somewhat exaggerated seems not to have been considered. (800,000 Russians
died during the 900-day siege of Leningrad; 1.3 million died in Stalingrad.)

Collectively, this misreporting was an assault on the truth on a par with
the New York Times’s Walter Duranty’s infamous cover-up of the
man-made famine inflicted by Stalin on millions of Ukrainians, Kazakhs and others in the 1930s.

The siege of Stalingrad left over 1.3 million dead

There were malicious and slanderous reports against Israel in the American
media too – with Arafat’s propagandists given hundreds of hours
on television to air their incredible tales of Israeli atrocities –
but at least some American journalists attempted to be fair. On April 16,
Newsday’s reporter in Jenin, Edward Gargan, wrote: “There is
little evidence to suggest that Israeli troops conducted a massacre of the
dimensions alleged by Palestinian officials.” Molly Moore of the Washington
Post reported: “No evidence has yet surfaced to support allegations
by Palestinian groups and aid organizations of large-scale massacres or
executions.”

Compare this with some of the things which appeared in the British media
on the very same day, April 16: Under the headline “Amid the ruins,
the grisly evidence of a war crime,” the Jerusalem correspondent for
the London Independent, Phil Reeves, began his dispatch from Jenin: “A
monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has
finally been exposed.” He continued: “The sweet and ghastly
reek of rotting human bodies is everywhere, evidence that it is a human
tomb. The people say there are hundreds of corpses, entombed beneath the
dust.”

Reeves spoke of “killing fields,” an image more usually associated
with Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Forgetting to tell his readers that Arafat’s
representatives, like those of the other totalitarian regimes that surround
Israel, have a habit of lying a lot, he quoted Palestinians who spoke of
“mass murder” and “executions.” Reeves didn’t
bother to quote any Israeli source whatsoever in his story. In another report
Reeves didn’t even feel the need to quote Palestinian sources at all
when he wrote about Israeli “atrocities committed in the Jenin refugee
camp, where its army has killed and injured hundreds of Palestinians.”

LEFT AND RIGHT UNITE AGAINST ISRAEL

Shiraz Nehmad, 7, died with her
parents and 3 year-old brother in
one of several suicide bombs in
Jerusalem shortly prior to Israel’s
defensive incursion into Jenin. Also
killed in that bomb were children
aged 12, 7, 18 months, and 7 months

But it wasn’t only journalists of the left who indulged in Israel
baiting. The right-wing Daily Telegraph – which some in the U.K. have
dubbed the “Daily Tel-Aviv-ograph” because its editorials are
frequently sympathetic to Israel – was hardly any less misleading
in its news coverage, running headlines such as “Hundreds of victims
‘were buried by bulldozer in mass grave.’”

In a story on April 15 entitled “Horror stories from the siege of
Jenin,” the paper’s correspondent, David Blair, took at face
value what he called “detailed accounts” by Palestinians that
“Israeli troops had executed nine men.” Blair quotes one woman
telling him that Palestinians were “stripped to their underwear, they
were searched, bound hand and foot, placed against a wall and killed with
single shots to the head.”

On the next day, April 16, Blair quoted a “family friend”
of one supposedly executed man: “Israeli soldiers had stripped him
to his underwear, pushed him against a wall and shot him.” He also
informed Telegraph readers that “two thirds of the camp had been destroyed.”
(In fact, as the satellite photos show, the destruction took place in one
small area of the camp.)

The “quality” British press spoke with almost wall-to-wall
unanimity. The Evening Standard’s Sam Kiley conjured up witnesses
to speak of Israel’s “staggering brutality and callous murder.”
The Times’s Janine di Giovanni, suggested that Israel’s mission
to destroy suicide bomb-making factories in Jenin (a town from which at
the Palestinians own admission 28 suicide bombers had already set out) was
an excuse by Ariel Sharon to attack children with chickenpox. The Guardian’s
Suzanne Goldenberg wrote, “The scale [of destruction] is almost beyond
imagination.”

In case British readers didn’t get the message from their “news
reporters,” the editorial writers spelled it out loud and clear. On
April 17, the Guardian’s lead editorial compared the Israeli incursion
in Jenin with the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11. “Jenin,”
wrote the Guardian was “every bit as repellent in its particulars,
no less distressing, and every bit as man-made.”

“Jenin camp looks like the scene of a crime… Jenin already has that
aura of infamy that attaches to a crime of especial notoriety,” continued
this once liberal paper, which used to pride itself on its honesty –
and one of whose former editors coined the phrase “comment is free,
facts are sacred.”

“THE POISONING OF WATER SUPPLIES”

Whereas the Guardian’s editorial writers compared the Jewish state
to al Qaeda, Evening Standard commentators merely compared the Israeli government
to the Taliban. Writing on April 15, A. N. Wilson, one of the Evening Standard’s
leading columnists accused Israel of “the poisoning of water supplies”
(a libel dangerously reminiscent of ancient anti-Semitic myths) and wrote
“we are talking here of massacre, and a cover-up, of genocide.”

He also attempted to pit Christians against Jews by accusing Israel of
“the willful burning of several church buildings,” and making
the perhaps even more incredible assertion that “Many young Muslims
in Palestine are the children of Anglican Christians, educated at St George’s
Jerusalem, who felt that their parents’ mild faith was not enough
to fight the oppressor.”

The Jewish holy site Joseph’s tomb,
all but destroyed by a Palestinian mob
while Arafat’s security forces looked on

Then, before casually switching to write about how much money Catherine
Zeta-Jones is paying her nanny, Wilson wrote: “Last week, we saw the
Israeli troops destroy monuments in Nablus of ancient importance: the scene
where Jesus spoke to a Samaritan woman at the well. It is the equivalent
of the Taliban destroying Buddhist sculpture.” (Perhaps Wilson had
forgotten that the only monument destroyed in Nablus since Arafat launched
his war against Israel in September 2000, was the ancient Jewish site of
Joseph’s tomb, torn down by a Palestinian mob while Arafat’s
security forces looked on.)

Other commentators threw in the Holocaust, turning it against Israel.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a leading columnist for the Independent wrote (April
15): “I would suggest that Ariel Sharon should be tried for crimes
against humanity … and be damned for so debasing the profoundly important
legacy of the Holocaust, which was meant to stop forever nations turning
themselves into ethnic killing machines.”

Many of the hostile comments were leveled at the U.S. “Why, for
God’s sake, can’t Mr Powell do the decent thing and demand an
explanation for the extraordinary, sinister events that have taken place
in Jenin? Does he really have to debase himself in this way? Does he think
that meeting Arafat, or refusing to do so, takes precedence over the enormous
slaughter that has overwhelmed the Palestinians?” wrote Robert Fisk
in the Independent.

“STAINING THE STAR OF DAVID WITH BLOOD”

In the wake of the media attacks, came the politicians. Speaking in the
House of Commons on April 16, Gerald Kaufman, a veteran Labor member of
parliament and a former shadow foreign secretary, announced that Ariel Sharon
was a “war criminal” who led a “repulsive government.”
To nods of approval from his fellow parliamentarians, Kaufman, who is Jewish,
said the “methods of barbarism against the Palestinians” supposedly
employed by the Israeli army were “staining the Star of David with
blood.”

Passover 2002: 30 dead, 140 injured. After
dozens of suicide bombs, for many Israelis
this was the final straw. “Operation Defen-
sive Shield” was launched a few days later

Speaking on behalf of the opposition Conservative party, John Gummer,
a former cabinet minister, also lashed out at Israel. He said he was basing
his admonition on “the evidence before us.” Was Gummer perhaps
referring to the twisted news reports he may have watched from the BBC’s
correspondent Orla Guerin? Or maybe his evidence stemmed from the account
given by Ann Clwyd, a Labour MP, who on return from a fleeting fact-finding
mission to Jenin, told parliament she had a “croaky voice” and
this was all the fault of dust caused by Israeli tanks.

Clwyd had joined a succession of VIP visitors parading through Jenin –
members of the European parliament, U.S. church leaders, Amnesty International
Secretary-General Irene Khan, Bianca Jagger, ex-wife of pop-music legend
Mick Jagger. Clwyd’s voice wasn’t sufficiently croaky, though,
to prevent her from calling on all European states to withdraw their ambassadors
from Israel.

Not to be outdone by politicians, Britain’s esteemed academics went
further. Tom Paulin, who lectures in 19th- and 20th-century literature at
Oxford University, opined that the U.S.-born Jews who live on the west bank
of the river Jordan should be “shot dead.”

“They are Nazis, racists,” he said, adding (though one might
have thought this was unnecessary after his previous comment) “I feel
nothing but hatred for them.” (Paulin is also one of BBC television’s
regular commentators on the arts. The BBC says they will continue to invite
him even after these remarks; Oxford University has taken no action against
him.)

ONLY ONE WITNESS?

“Jenin martyrs brigade”

On closer examination, the “facts” on which many of the media
reports were based – “facts” that no doubt played a role
in inspiring such hateful remarks as Paulin’s – reveal an even
greater scandal. The British media appear to have based much of its evidence
of “genocide” on a single individual: “Kamal Anis, a labourer”
(The Times), “Kamal Anis, 28” (The Daily Telegraph), “A
quiet, sad-looking young man called Kamal Anis” (The Independent),
and referred to the same supposed victim – “the burned remains
of a man, Bashar” (The Evening Standard), “Bashir died in agony”
(The Times), “A man named only as Bashar once lived there” (The
Daily Telegraph).

The Independent: “Kamal Anis saw the Israeli soldiers pile 30 bodies
beneath a half-wrecked house. When the pile was complete, they bulldozed
the building, bringing its ruins down on the corpses. Then they flattened
the area with a tank.”

The Times: “Kamal Anis says the Israelis levelled the place; he
saw them pile bodies into a mass grave, dump earth on top, then ran over
it to flatten it.”

Evidently, as can be seen from the following reports, British journalists
hadn’t been speaking to the same Palestinian witnesses as American
journalists.

The Los Angeles Times: Palestinians in Jenin “painted a picture
of a vicious house-to-house battle in which Israeli soldiers faced Palestinian
gunmen intermixed with the camp’s civilian population.”

The Boston Globe: Following extensive interviews with “civilians
and fighters” in Jenin “none reported seeing large numbers of
civilians killed.” On the other hand, referring to the deaths of Israeli
soldiers in Jenin, Abdel Rahman Sa’adi, an “Islamic Jihad grenade-thrower,”
told the Globe “This was a massacre of the Jews, not of us.”

Some in the American press also mentioned the video filmed by the Israeli
army (and shown on Israeli television) of Palestinians moving corpses of
people who had previously died of natural causes, rather than in the course
of the Jenin fighting, into graveyards around the camp to fabricate “evidence”
in advance of the now-cancelled U.N. fact-finding mission.

But if Europeans readers don’t trust American journalists, perhaps
they are ready to believe the testimony given in the Arab press. Take, for
example, the extensive interview with a Palestinian bomb-maker, Omar, in
the leading Egyptian newspaper, Al-Ahram.

“We had more than 50 houses booby-trapped around the [Jenin] camp,”
Omar said. “We chose old and empty buildings and the houses of men
who were wanted by Israel because we knew the soldiers would search for
them… We cut off lengths of mains water pipes and packed them with explosives
and nails. Then we placed them about four meters apart throughout the houses
– in cupboards, under sinks, in sofas... the women went out to tell
the soldiers that we had run out of bullets and were leaving. The women
alerted the fighters as the soldiers reached the booby-trapped area.”

Perhaps what is most shocking, though, is that the British press had closed
their ears to the Israelis themselves – a society with one of the
most vigorous and self-critical democracies in the world. In the words of
Kenneth Preiss, a professor at Ben Gurion University: “Please inform
the reporters trying to figure out if the Israeli army is trying to ‘hide
a massacre’ of Palestinians, that Israel’s citizen army includes
journalists, members of parliament, professors, doctors, human rights activists,
members of every political party, and every other kind of person, all within
sight and cell phone distance of home and editorial offices. Were the slightest
infringements to have taken place, there would be demonstrations outside
the prime minister’s office in no time.”

ONLY AN INTELLECTUAL COULD BE SO STUPID

Aftermath of the bomb attack
on Café Moment, Jerusalem.
11 young Israelis died.
The press barely covered it

George Orwell once remarked to a Communist fellow-traveler with whom he
was having a dispute: “You must be an intellectual. Only an intellectual
could say something so stupid.” This observation has relevance in
regard to the Middle East, too.

So far only the nonintellectual tabloids have grasped the essential difference
between right and wrong, the difference between a deliberate intent to kill
civilians, such as that ordered by Chairman Arafat over the past four decades,
and the unintentional deaths of civilians in the course of legitimate battle.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the mass-market papers have corrected the
lies of their supposedly superior broadsheets. On April 17, the New York
Post carried an editorial entitled “The massacre that wasn’t.”
In London, the most popular British daily paper, the Sun, published a lengthy
editorial (April 15) pointing out that: “Israelis are scared to death.
They have never truly trusted Britain – and with some of the people
we employ in the Foreign Office why the hell should they?” Countries
throughout Europe are still “in denial about murdering their entire
Jewish population,” the Sun added, and it was time to dispel the conspiracy
theory that Jews “run the world.”

The headline of the Sun’s editorial was “The Jewish faith
is not an evil religion.” One might think such a headline was unnecessary
in twenty-first century Britain, but apparently it is not.

One would hope that some honest reflection about their reporting by those
European and American journalists who are genuinely motivated by a desire
to help Palestinians (as opposed to those whose primary motive is demonizing
Jews), will enable them to realize that propagating the falsehoods of Arafat’s
propagandists does nothing to further the legitimate aspirations of ordinary
Palestinians, any more than parroting the lies of Stalin helped ordinary
Russians.

(Tom Gross is a former Jerusalem correspondent for the London Sunday
Telegraph and New York Daily News.)